Aaron Hotchen found guilty of possession for purposes of trafficking, gun charges

By Medicine Hat News on July 18, 2019.

An accused drug dealer who insisted court should spend an entire week listening to tapped prison phone calls for context has been convicted in part because of the picture painted by those communications.

Aaron Hotchen was found guilty of possessing methamphetamine, heroin, fentanyl and cocaine for the purposes of trafficking, as well as possessing an unauthorized firearm, careless use of a firearm, and three breaches of court orders.

Defence counsel Marc Crarer had argued Hotchen had left the hard drug trade before October 2017, when police raided a property and trailer near Seven Persons to take him into custody, finding the drugs, cash and a sawed-off shotgun.

During the calls, his lawyer argued at trail, he put on a pumped-up persona to impress women, collect debts to cover legal costs and get former associates to admit their part in the guns and drugs seized.

In reading the verdict on Wednesday morning at Provincial Court in Medicine Hat, Judge Paul Pharo said the calls were “detailed, graphic and serious indeed.”

“There’s overwhelming evidence that Hotchen was still dealing meth,” Pharo said of the calls and information found on cellphones and written down in notebooks.

“It’s not a credibility contest, it’s whether the Crown has proven the case beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Police say that Hotchen was a mid-level drug dealer, buying quantities of meth, fentanyl and cocaine from a supplier in Calgary, then providing it for re-sale to a network of street dealers in Medicine Hat.

Authorities spent two weeks watching a rural compound near Sevens Persons through October 2017 before raiding it, going through a heavy fence, and arresting eight people and taking away three pitbulls.

They found a loaded sawed-off shotgun beneath a disabled truck that contained a stash case. Police also seized minor amounts of drugs, drug paraphernalia and ammunition throughout the property and trailer.

Hotchen claimed he moved into a camper on the four-acre property that was a sort of scrap yard with 150 to 200 vehicles to escape the drug trade. He preferred and dealt marijuana, but had become addicted to meth in about 2015.

Taking the stand during the trial in late 2018, he argued the drugs and weapons found belonged to those who visited the property.

“I didn’t care what people brought out as long as they took responsibility for it,” he testified.

Hotchen also said he invited a Medicine Hat man to live at the plot in exchange for $500 per month that he collected on the day of the raid, then threw away as he fled police who were serving the warrant.

Pharo found many of Hotchen’s answers on the stand to be “evasive, not credible, or contradictory.”

“I can’t accept that Mr. Hotchen would ask a person, who he knew to be a drug dealer, to live at the property and not have drugs,” Pharo concluded.

Court also heard sentencing submissions from Crarer and Crown prosecutor Jeremy Newton.

Crarer asked for a sentence ranging from four to 4.5 years, while Newton requested 10.5 years.

A date for the sentencing verdict will be set July 23.

20
-19